‘I left with my head held high’

By Charles Sowell  

DECEMBER 21, 2011 1:34 p.m. (1)

Afghanistan was the point of no return for 16-year Marine veteran Rick Sebastian.

The 36-year-old former gunnery sergeant had enough during the seemingly constant firefights in a remote river valley in the western section of that war-torn land in 2010 and 2011. He left the Corps in April of this year.

“When the Afghan tour was over I figured it was time to get out,” he said of leaving the Corps just four years from retirement with full benefits. “I’d done everything I wanted to do (platoon leader, sniper team leader, terrorism interdiction covert work in South America). I left with my head held high.”

Nothing prepared him for the intensity of the war in Afghanistan, not even the battle for Fallujah, Iraq, where he was wounded twice in 2004.  When Sebastian talks about Afghanistan his mind seems to leave the room and he travels back in time to 135-degree heat and long-range gun battles with Taliban occupying the high ground around his firebase. His stare is eerie.

“The longest we went without a firefight was 11 days,” he said sitting at the breakfast table in his neat Mauldin suburban home while his son Andres, 19 months, squirmed in his lap.

Sebastian’s twins, Andres and Carmen, had been born just months before he shipped out.

“He left before they were walking and came home to find toddlers,” said Sebastian’s wife Kelly.

He came home a changed man, as do all combat veterans, to a family he loves but doesn’t really know because of six deployments overseas since 2001.

For Kelly and Sebastian’s mother Carmen there is a tension, too, palpable in the air as Sebastian talks about his experiences in two theaters of war.

“He’s got PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder),” Kelly said. “But he’s not getting treatment, at least not yet.”

There is a sense the two women want the husband and son they know and love back and a fear that it might not happen.

The Veterans Administration is reluctant to talk about post traumatic stress, the agency refused permission for Brett Litz, a psychology professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, to speak to the Journal.

Litz is a leading researcher on PTSD for the Department of Defense and the VA.

Published reports show the vast majority of PTSD sufferers are front line combat troops, like Sebastian. As of 2007 roughly 40,000 had been diagnosed since the start of the War on Terror – which has now become one of America’s longest wars.

The War on Terror started with a bombing campaign in Afghanistan in October of 2001.

Full-blown combat involvement in Vietnam lasted from 1965 to 1975, but the country was involved in that conflict, in one way or another, for nearly 30 years.

“These guys (War on Terror vets) are the 1 percent (out of all Americans) who have carried the fight to our enemies,” said Brenda Jansons, president of the Greenville chapter of the Military Officers Association of America and a Vietnam War field hospital nurse. “They are the 1 percent that doesn’t have protesters filling the streets. They are largely forgotten.”

Sebastian was wounded in a confrontation with a terrorist fighter in Fallujah. He’d stepped around a corner to lob a grenade into an occupied house just as the terrorist appeared.

“He raised his gun and fired just as I lobbed the grenade,” he said. “I got hit in the arm and leg. The whole bottom part of his body was blown away. The terrorist was wearing full body armor, at least as good as ours. They got it on the Internet.”

Getting out of the firefight zone for medical treatment was a nightmare, Sebastian said. An armored vehicle was brought up to evacuate the wounded, but before Sebastian and another platoon member could be loaded (the man’s leg was nearly shot in two) the vehicle came under grenade attack.

“They were trying to get one into the vehicle and we were trying to keep their heads down long enough to get the wounded inside,” he said. “We managed to get in and get the door shut. When they took off the vehicle lurched forward sending my buddy and I sliding across the floor and we slammed into the back of the vehicle.

“My buddy’s (wounded) leg bent like an ‘L.’ the screaming was terrible.”

“After Rick got shot (and the family realized he was going back to war) we all chipped in and bought him better body armor,” Carmen said.

His road back to war lead him through various field hospitals in Iraq, to a facility in Germany and then to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington. He came home for the last part of his recuperation where Kelly packed and debrieded (removed the dead flesh from) his wounds daily.

“Hurt like hell,” Sebastian said.

“It was not pleasant,” said Kelly. “But I was so glad to have him home, I’d have done anything.”

In Iraq, as of Tuesday, 4,408 military personnel had been killed – 3,480 of that total were combat deaths. There have been 31,921 wounded.

In Afghanistan, as of Tuesday, 1,717 have died – of that total 1,435 were combat deaths. There have been 14,793 wounded.